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Program Offers Free E-Books to Low-Income Children

Open eBooks, a program making thousands of best-selling books available for free to low-income children, signed up roughly 50,000 users on its first day, according a report by the project’s partner organizations.

Started on Feb. 24 with a video message from Michelle Obama, Open eBooks allows adults working in libraries, schools, shelters, hospitals and other settings to request access for the children they serve. The books, provided by more than 10 publishers, are selected by a “curation corps” and can be downloaded through an app on the children’s own mobile devices. (According to a study released last year, 85 percent of families below the poverty line with children aged between 6 and 13 own a tablet or a smartphone.)

The nongovernmental effort, which guarantees access over the next three years to inventory valued at $250 million, is a partnership between the Digital Public Library of America, the New York Public Library and First Book, a nonprofit group founded in 1992 to provide books and educational materials to children in need. The distributor Baker & Taylor provided content support.

Dan Cohen, the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, wrote in a blog post that the program would go beyond the e-book loans already offered by public libraries.

“Qualified kids will be able to read any of these ebooks on a whim, and at the same time, unlike with apps that require a reader to check a book back in before it can be read by someone else,” Mr. Cohen wrote. “This is truly ‘all you can read’ for children in low-income areas of the United States.”

A version of this article appears in print on 03/01/2016, on page C3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Program Gives E-Books to Low-Income Children.